Humanity ... Learning to Live Together

One of the most significant aspects of being human is the "social" aspect.

I put social in quotes because 1. I want it to stand out, and 2. I want to adjust the meaning of it as I'm using it here. This is a convention I use often in my writing, to define the terms I'm using, or using in a special way. What I often find is that people use language in a particular way, or to convery a very specific or precise point and then leave it up to the reader/listener to make sense of for themselves. Yet it seems to me that language doesn't work that way, especially if you're using "common" words, words that are used frequently and most people who are speakers of that language assume they know and understand. This effect is what I refer to as semantic loading, the "load" that the words carry with them into a conversation or dialogue. Whenever possible I prefer to use words that are unfamiliar if getting a specific or precise point across is my intention. Or minimally to explain what I mean by a word as I'm using it. This is all part and parcel of the building of the social realities we share, which to a large extent are held intact by our social communication.

So what do I mean by "social" in relation to it being an aspect of begin human? In this case what many people accept is, "Of course it's an aspect of being human, humans are social creatures!" DUH! Well what I want to propose here is that "social" isn't just an aspect of being human, it's essentially what we are - i.e.: not "humans" but "humanity" ... a collective. More like a beehive than like a bee or even bees. The beehive is the essential unit in bee life, not the bee. The bee doesn't exist apart from the beehive, it doesn't have a place or purpose without the beehive. Yet there is a kind of myth about the "lone wolf" human. The individual who somehow makes it alone. This is an especially poignant myth in American society. It's the pioneer who strikes out into the wilderness to make it on their own. The original "self-made' man (it's almost always a man BTW) who pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps so to speak.

Joseph Campbell actually traces this myth back to what he says is the "essential" or "core" myth (quotes mine, not Campbell's) of the Western world. This is the "Grail Myth" or the myth about the search for the Holy Grail of Christ by the Knights of the Roundtable from King Arthur's Court in Britan. In this particular myth the essential part of the story (for Campbell in his telling of it) is when the knights go off on their individual quests for the Grail. The key is when they all decide that they will begin their quests at the darkest, deepest part of the forest surrounding Camelot, going where no man has gone before. Literally carving out their own paths as they go. This idea is so deeply embedded in the Western psyche as an "ideal" that it's become ubequitous in the sense of becoming a "Truth" or a way of being that is somehow the "natural" way of being for mankind (and womankind in this case as well).

This holy Western myth gives rise to the idea that we must first and foremost strive to become what we are essentially not, individuals apart from others.

I love this myth, don't get me wrong, it is ingrained and integrated into my psyche as well. Even as I understand the absurdity of it, the ill-logic, the absolute foolishness of it ... it appeals to me greatly. To be a "man among men" blah, blah, blah. This is a corruption of the essential and obvious empirical nature of being among mankind, part of the whole-form structure of humanity itself. It's seems so empirically obvious to me that humanity is the essential characteristic of being human. The connection with other and others that make up what we experience as life.

Yet what impedes this most simple premise, that we are actually all parts of a greater whole-form called humanity, is that we are also obviously, essentially, empirically individuals. Shit, shit, shit ... there goes a great theory!!! How is this reconcilable, that we are most essentially "humanity" the great swell of humans of which each of us is an inextricable part in the whole-form being, and that we are also simultaneously and obviously human.

Well there are lots of things I could point to but I'll point to just one for now. In spite of the seeming strongest desire of all to live, probably every day, many times a day someone is putting their life on the line for others. Literally as the bees in the hive put the safety and integrity of the hive before their own interests, humans too have been doing this for too many eons to count. Yet this so often gets lost in the quest for individualism. The "trick" is that it is the individuals who make up the hive. Each one in a way "is" the hive. Every human is humanity, all by themselves. Somehow I propose to you we get this basic essential idea, that "we" are humanity, if even one of us survives humanity exists.

I know I'm out there on this posting for some of you. However, this point becomes essential to where I'm going. That the most essential milieu of humanity is humanity itself and this is the ocean you swim in such as the fish swims in the sea. The difference is that the fish isn't the water or even a part of it, but every human alive is humanity. This is the key to getting the essence of the social contract, the creation of social reality, social ontology ... getting that we create our reality and then live in it is essential to getting the whole point I'm on course to making. More than that what I'm offering for your consideration is that simply by having been born you've begun to create the reality that others share called humanity.

What's crucial about the arguement I'll be making revolves around the critical role of communication as the foundational form of the social contract, and unlike others I don't place communication inside of language, but language inside of communication - which is housed in "Being" which resides on the ground of the body-form or in the somatic-form. What I'm saying obliquely above (at least for some) is that all experience is housed in the body and the somatic response. That our individual experience is a somatic one that had in relation to other(s), making it essentially inter-subjective. This is the leap from the phenomenological experience to the inter-subjective experience as the basis of all experience.


Simply put, where your body goes you're always there.


This is unlike the existentialists who suggest that somehow "life" itself is "out there" apart from you and you're always seeking it to make it somehow "real" to and for yourself. I just call this bad learning. Compare my statement above to Heidegger who said, "Language is the house of Being." This forms the essential existentialist stance. What I've said and am saying is, "The body is the house of Being, while you're residing within this house."

Where I'm going with this is to unfold the structure of the ontological form you reside inside of from birth until death. That there is a "Reality" (upper-case "R") and we all reside in relation to it and within it as well. And that our experience is housed in "reality" which is our inter-subjective experience of "Reality" plus what we ourselves create, both to explain it and added to it ... what we share and experience that isn't there (in "Reality) but for each of us is just as or even more "real." The essence of which is our shared experience of being human. (Breathe) And, that, that "reality" is housed in the somatic expression and the experience it creates.

Whoa, heady stuff today I know ... I promise a more "human" posting tomorrow ...


Joseph (last posting from Sunny Southern California this time around ...)